If I ever create a trendy SaaS company (or an untrendy one for that matter), I'm definitely cribbing the 'pay more if you have accountants on staff' criteria... love it!
While you’re at it, can you find and punch the guy who thinks it’s a good idea to zoom the map to “actual size, 1cm = 1cm” mode for your entire trip?
I assume he’s also the one that taught it to spitefully let you drive off the side of the screen if you ever zoom out manually so that you can see more road on the phone than you can in real life. (With a “recenter” button that will zoom you all the way back in).
Also punch the guy that allows Google Maps navigation to flip back to a route that's been specifically rejected.
Earlier this week Google prompted me with "your route may be affected by tsunami warning". Indeed, so I chose the longer, inland route rather than the coast roads.
15 minutes later I realise it's rerouted me "due to traffic conditions" -- obviously the coast road isn't as busy!
(This has happened many times before, but this was the first time I had a safety reason not to take the faster route.)
Go back and read all those books you were supposed to have read in high school.
It turns out, they are actually really good. And now you're old enough and have had enough life experience to understand and relate to them.
I remember kinda liking "The Sun Also Rises" in highschool literature class. There were these people travelling around Spain and drinking a lot. I could relate. At some point in my late 20s, I came across a copy and read it again. Turns out it's an awesome book, and about more than just swilling wine.
So the thought occurred that since one of those terrible highschool literature books was good, maybe more of them would be. I grabbed The Great Gatsby. Awesome book. Whatever JD Sallinger thing they had us read. Awesome. Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Oscar Wilde. Hell yeah. And all those authors had tons of other great stuff they'd written. And there were lots of authors in the last hundred-odd years. It kinda kicked off a lifetime of seeking out the Good Stuff.
One minor downside, as long as we're doing a PSA, is that doing this will kill your ability to read Airport Bestsellers of any genre. You'll need actual good writing from here on out. Fortunately, there's lots of people still doing that so they should be able to crank out new good books faster than you can read them.
This reply rings true, but also had me thinking. If rereading those books when you're old enough makes you appreciate them, are they ideal for high school? Do they teach you what's good writing if you can't recognize it yet? Does it make sense to, then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and understand more in high school? I don't have the right answer, but the question seemed relevant.
>> Does it make sense to, then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and understand more in high school?
I guess it depends on the goal. My opinion is that reading hard books at school simply turns people off reading completely. If the reading is fun there's more chance students will carry on reading.
So if the goal is "teach kids that reading is fun. So they do it. Which means their ability to read goes up" , then yes, the books should be more fun.
(We read a Spike Milligan book, which certainly engaged the class more than Wuthering Heights did.)
On the other hand if the goal is to understand "literature", then books with themes and character development and so on is necessary. And of course can put some kids off reading for life.
>My opinion is that reading hard books at school simply turns people off reading completely.
The thing is, most of these books people are complaining about aren't actually 'hard books', especially when read at a chapter or two per week with a teacher guiding you through all the major themes. The goal isn't to teach kids that reading is fun, it's to teach them critical reading skills.
There is something to be said about reaching the students where they are, but we already dumb down things too much to allow the slower students to keep pace. They can learn about reading for fun in remedial reading classes.
It's probably good if the book requires you to stretch a bit, and even if you don't totally get it yet. My parents never put any limits on what I could read, so I stumbled over the Poe shelf at the library at a fairly young age. There was plenty I didn't understand, but plenty that I could, and some stories still stick with me.
But I remember when my niece told us they had them reading Nietzsche. Her main takeaway seemed to be that they were Very Smart because they were reading Nietzsche. She didn't have a clue what she was reading, so if any of it stuck with her, it was probably as likely to be misunderstood as understood.
They have to be able to reach high enough to get some of it. It has to repay their time in high school. It should also show them there's more to reach for, but they need to be able to get some of it.
For me, Gatsby was... not entirely terrible. It was mostly a waste of my time, but looking back I can see some of the themes were at least somewhat worthwhile.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an absolute waste of my time. If Joyce is worth an adult reading (which I doubt to this day), then don't make high school kids read him.
>This reply rings true, but also had me thinking. If rereading those books when you're old enough makes you appreciate them, are they ideal for high school?
Possibly, good books hit different at different ages and can be appreciated at each of those ages for different reasons.
Indeed. It's a giant, unrecognized problem with pedagogy. Things are taught from the position of already understanding them and the messy confusing process of actually grokking anything is mostly ignored and students are left to figure it out alone.
I agree with the suggestion to try it, because I've had similar experiences myself in a different area: history. Even reading the dry Wikipedia articles made the old topics seem much more interesting than I remembered them being in school, and did a better job at communicating the significance.
However, I wouldn't be so optimistic about your experience being universal. As an experiment, I just started re-reading The Great Gatsby. While it's much better than I remember, it still felt like a slog and failed to hook me in a way that such prized "you have to be familiar with this" literature should be. And I still think they could have done a better job communicating what's so good about it.
Relatedly, I only recently learned that some (most?) people actually like iambic pentameter, that it adds to the joy of hearing the lines read. This is a revelation, since it ... doesn't do anything for me. But that fact feels like it's important subtext that could have been communicated, and I could have been pushed in that direction -- that seems like the obvious move. And yet it just wasn't. Sure, they taught that Shakespeare used it, but only as a dry "oh hey this is one thing to note about his works" not in a "oh and this is a big part of its appeal".
There are a lot of missed opportunities for teaching appreciation of literature.
Couldn't agree more about history. I was a good student who couldn't stand history (called "social studies" in my school), did the minimum to get through it wth good grades, then never took a college history course that wasn't required. Then one day in the library I was looking for a big thick book to pass a chunk of time, and grabbed Shirer's "The rise and fall of the Third Reich." Not only was it fascinating on its own, but it referenced so much of the history that underlay the events of WWII that it sent me off on a hunt to fill in that missing background. And, well, now I'm hooked!
(I'm not sure if I didn't enjoy the grade-school stuff because of what I now recognize as its jingoism (it's so much more interesting to read the history of people making choices for human reasons, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes just wrong, than of godlike heroes helming countries foredestined for greatness!), or just because I wasn't ready for it.)
I'm not sure I agree with this. People are different and not everyone has to enjoy so-called literature that is not pure entertainment.
I have shelves full of books I had read before finishing school, and 90% of what we read in English lessons (I am German) was ok, and yet I hated 90% of what we read (or supposed to read) in our German lessons. Maybe it was the selection, maybe it was implicit bias (I also liked English lessons and my teachers, and didn't like either for German). Just some from memory (annotated Shakespeare was ok, I liked Poe, I liked Huxley)
So no, except for a few you would not manage to convince me to give them a second chance.
And also no for your last point, some Dan Brown novels were ok and I didn't enjoy the rest in the first place ;)
Been a while, but yeah, we read shorter stuff in class, and had some books we had to read on our own to discuss and you also had to give at least one short talk on another book you read.
It's RUINED for me. I could never go back and read it. There's far too much else I'd rather have cross my eyeballs so many other stories in the library. By having a work unworthy of my experience and tastes wasted on me at a young age my emotional investment in it is already squandered.
Have a big list of OK books. Have some representative excerpts from them, and let the kids pick books they're going to enjoy. The point surely is NOT to haze / torment the kids with 'bad' books that discourage reading generally.
We read selections from The Canterbury Tales, in translation, as high school freshman. Our genius history teacher made us promise not to tell our parents, and let us read one of the dirty ones. I was sold.
Later, I learned Middle English, and read the entire Tales. He's brilliant. Reliably funny and engaging (except for one chapter, obviously written in spite after being swindled IRL!).
I read The Great Gatsby outside of formal education, for my own benefit, during my college years, in a non-U.S. country. I thought it was the opposite of "actually really good", I found it to be a resolutely mediocre experience. At no stage did I get any inkling as to why it might be considered "a great book".
Another that baffles me is The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
People can read it if they want, but if they find it dull four chapters in, just walk away, sometimes "the greats" are just culturally significant, or not your style, or whatever.
There are lots of good books out there though, and I'm glad you discovered something above the airport bestsellers. May I suggest to absolutely anyone
Haven’t read Dickens, but Melville was a revelation for me. His short stories are great, but Moby Dick is a work of glory. It’s hard to explain why, but Moby Dick basically bifurcated my life: there was the time before I read it and the time after. That being said, I would have hated it in high school and am glad it wasn’t assigned. It was something I could only appreciate in my 30s.
>Idk, Dickens and Melville are pretty hard to get through.
If you're reading for just funsies, sure. But none of their works are particularly long, even reading a few chapters here and there, it'd take a week for each at most.
In the YouTube comments for the song "Informer" by Snow ("Informer, <lots of words>, a licky boom-boom now"), someone refers to it as "the final boss of learning English".
Do you have a list of books you can recommend? (I was born and raised in Russia, so I imagine my school books list is quite different from yours; I would, of course, like to read from both.)
100% agree with you that it's worth going back and reading The Books You Should Read as an adult who can just read them as books and not some sort of obligation. That said. some of them are still stinkers that only a weird boomer could love. I'm looking at you, A Separate Peace & fucking anything by Joseph Conrad (sorry).
Half the pleasure of reading these books as they were meant to be read (as books, and not at frogs to be dissected in class) is that you get to discover it for yourself--a mix of life-changing gems and I-guess-you-had-to-be-there meditations on being a failson in the twilight of British imperialism
Childhood me hopes this will play out exactly like the Six Million Dollar Man episode. That it will roam around terrorizing rural California, and we’ll have to team up with a pretty young Russian scientist and Bigfoot to stop it.
I wonder if the producers of that show knew about that failed mission, and that this was actually really in earth orbit, when they wrote that episode.
“Oscar: Irina, you know that Steve is bionic. If he's careful ...
Irina: You don't understand. I designed that probe for Venus. Venus Oscar. A planet with temperatures of 900 degrees, 300 mile per hour winds, pressures up to 90 earth atmospheres. Even a bionic man couldn't survive under those conditions.”
I notice that I have a form of Gell-Mann amnesia for this sort of thing. Do we need a new term, or does that cover it?
Because I find myself nodding along with optimism, having two grandfathers that died from this disease. It’d be great if something could sift through all the data and come up with a novel solution.
Then I remember that this is the same technology that eagerly tries to autocomplete every other line of my code to include two nonexistent variables and a nonexistent function.
I hope this field has some good people to sanity check this stuff.
"I was optimistic when my friend told me about his new hammer and how much it helped him assemble a cabinet he was working on.
Then I remember that this is the same technology that failed to drive in screws for a project I was working on a week ago."
The AI that's being used in applications like this is not generative AI. It really is just "sparkling statistics" and it's tremendously useful in applications like this because it can accelerate the finding of patterns in data that form the basis of new discoveries.
Indeed. So the visitor need only wait for the 20mb javascript bundle, but not the 600kb of images, before he can see the 1kb of text that he visited the site to read.
Can you define your hydrogen colors for us? It sounds like you have something interesting to say, but I can’t parse what it is out of your company’s jargon.
There's also "white" which is naturally occurring pure hydrogen.
Mostly it's seen as being economically infeasible to extract, though there is one working well in the world, and some other potential sources that may be feasible to extract discovered recently.
But the big problem with hydrogen is that right now, the majority of the supply is grey/brown/black, which all emit CO2 to produce. Green is far more expensive, and the carbon capture needed for blue is also expensive and the methods of storage are dodgy.
The thing about green hydrogen is that it's more efficient to transmit and store electricity than convert it to hydrogen and distribute and store that, so it's basically just a worse way of utilizing green energy sources. The only reason hydrogen is at all economical is that grey/brown/black are cheap, and it's hard to see any path for green or blue to become competitive (and truly zero emissions for blue).
It's possible that we'll find reserves of white hydrogen and efficient ways to extract it, but that's purely speculative right now, while building renewable energy sources, electric distribution, and batteries can be done right now.
10% of power is lost to distribution anyway. Batteries can also lose 10%.
The issue with hydrogen isn't producing it, it's that it's an absolute nightmare to transport and store. Hydrogen can soak into metals, causing them to become brittle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement and it leaks if there's absolutely any chance of it possibly leaking (thanks to the small molecules, and its tendancy to cause everything it touches to go brittle), and can cause a very big bang if it does leak.
It might work well for planes (where power to weight is at an absolute premium) but for cars and buses the weight of a bigger but tamer battery just makes more sense. It's absolutely a good rocket fuel.
The issue isn't that it can't be green. The issue is that it's rocket fuel - high performance but dangerous and high maintenance. Putting rocket fuel in a bus is just dumb.
But then you have even more losses when you convert the hydrogen back to energy.
The formula is that 55kW of electricity used to generate hydrogen from water and then converted back to electricity in a gas turbine or fuel cell results in 15kW of energy.
That's a lot more than 20%.
Compare that to just storing the 55kW in batteries and using them to spin an electric engine. "Hydrogen economy" only makes sense if you have infinite free electricity or massive overproduction.
> "Hydrogen economy" only makes sense if you have infinite free electricity or massive overproduction.
Or when batteries are really expensive and global production and/or geopolitics prevents a global power grid.
Both were the case 15 years ago (and geopolitics still prevents a global power grid today, but metal production has increased and is now sufficient).
Hydrogen wasn't entirely stupid back then; even though PV was more expensive than today, the trends were already clear.
Now? I think hydrogen is suboptimal for most users. But I wouldn't bet against the idea of someone, somewhere, likely in the arctic or antarctic circles, deciding that they really do need multiple months of energy storage, and for those specific weird edge cases I think it's at least possible they might decide a cryogenic liquid hydrogen tank the size of the space shuttle external tank, refuelled every summer by a comically large PV array that works 24 hours in some days, is less silly than 3 gigawatt-hours of batteries.
That's calculated in the total losses. You either need to compress it or freeze it. Usually for vehicles it's compressed, for long term storage or transfer it could be either.
Frequently the green energy used to split water is "surplus" energy. For example the bulk of offshore wind energy happens between 10pm and 2am when energy demand is at its lowest. That energy goes to waste if not stored in hydrogen. Hence, efficiency is irrelevant.
Sure, but as long as we are burning natural gas, hydrogen is a bonus. Either use it or let it be wasted.
Using it to power public transportation is a great idea, if only we can get some better hydrogen fueling infrastructure. It should have a fair shake against electrics as electric vehicle power generation is using a lot of natural gas stations to charge up those cars !
Red hydrogen: produce hydrogen from a thermochemical reaction between water, iodine, and sulfur at a high temperature, around 900°C, using the thermal energy from a nuclear reactor.
"Blue hydrogen" is commonly used for hydrogen produced from natural gas. If it is produced by steam reforming (most common), then the associated CO2 emissions are worse than if you just burn the natural gas directly.
"Green hydrogen" is usually hydrogen produced from water by electrolysis, using electricity from non-CO2 source, e.g. wind or electricity.
Right, if you "oops" don't have working capture because it's never been practical you're making "Blue" hydrogen in which your customers can tell everybody they're environmentally friendly but due to a technical hitch you are emitting lots of CO2. Maybe you can agree a token $1B fine, of course offset against the taxes you were already going to pay, and everybody carries on as before. Hooray for your profitable corporation and oops, too bad for the stupid humans who live on the gradually less inhabitable planet you're destroying.
This would only be really dumb if the corporation was owned by humans. Huh.
Green hydrogen is produced from electrolysis of water where the energy is comming from a renevable source. (Imagine solar panels which are directly connected to an electrolysis plant.)
“Green-ish” hydrogen is produced from electrolysis of water where the energy is comming from the grid. (And thus as green as your grid is.)
For what it’s worth, HN is already a bit like this.
Back when I lived in the ‘states, I’d wake up in the morning and participate in all sorts of interesting discussions on a bunch of fresh posts.
Now, living in Europe, I wake up to a homepage full of “7 hours ago” top comments with 200 points on them. Any contribution we make from here will last maybe a minute or two before getting sorted down out of view.
I spend most of my time now reading what y’all had to say about stuff.
Imagine the disadvantage I am at by living in Australia, just about everything is posted while I am asleep. With that said this is a disadvantage across just about all social platforms, not just HN though.
https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx
I’m still waiting for the next generation of trendy SaaS companies to crib it.